~ Random stories

KOOOOONG! (In best Shatner voice)

Went to see King Kong with alobear tonight. To get it out of the way first – yes, Andy Serkis deserves an Oscar.

The film really is a spectacular in the old vaudevillian styles. You’ll laugh, you’ll scream, you’ll cry – “Roll up, roll up, the whole world is here!” kind of thing. The plot is laughable (alobear and I laughed quite a lot in the wrong places) and the acting is often ropy as hell but that really doesn’t matter. You’re not here for great dramatic art – you’re here to be entertained and it does that by the bucketload. In fact several bucketloads – at over three hours surely there must be someone in the world who can stand up to Mr Jackson and say “Pete, mate, we need to cut about an hour from this. Now, put down the troll club…”.

There are a couple of wonderful shout-outs. Carl Denham asks if they can get Fay to work on the movie only to be told she’s doing some little picture for RKO (Fay Wray shooting the original Kong). Also on the Venture there is a cage containging a Sumatran Rat-Monkey in a great reference to Braindead.

The SFX are, as should be expected from WETA, excellent but strangely the best in show aren’t reserved for Kong but instead for the arial shots of New York that are simply stunning. Weird, as I’ve mentioned about other movies, that computer SFX are seemless these days and yet blue-screen shots are so obvious it’s really starting to grate.